


Tell Me Again

by naninanito



Category: Kamen Rider OOO
Genre: Gen, Spoilers, sad about birds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-14 00:50:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2171634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naninanito/pseuds/naninanito
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the smallest things we wrap around ourselves when things are at their worst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tell Me Again

**Author's Note:**

> I was frustrated and tired, so I wrote something sad! You know, like one does.

Shingo Izumi's body needed food to survive. Ankh hadn't foreseen this and had no real name for the gnawing ache that sprung up in the center of his body from time to time. It wasn't like the burning absence, the consciousness of steady decay, that he recognized as the need for medals. He wrote it off as damage to the body, just another thing he'd have to work around like he worked around the holes in Shingo's trauma-rattled memory banks.

He didn't notice Eiji watching him those first few nights on the river bank, watching him watch. On the third night their eyes met over the fire and the three fish Eiji had caught and cooked for himself. The ones Ankh had been watching, smelling, and wanting quietly without the words to articulate why. When he uprooted one of the green twigs he'd fashioned into skewers and held it out, Ankh made a show of recoiling from it. It smelled nice. That it smelled at all was a miracle to Ankh, but it smelled _nice_.

“Here. There's more, take it.”

He liked fish, or at least these small ones, he decided. Their flesh was soft and mild, and their tiny rib bones cooked into gelatin that coated his lips and warmed his empty belly. He ate the first like an animal would and thought nothing of it when Eiji offered him a second.

The small changes to their daily routine after that day didn't escape Ankh's notice, though he kept his observations to himself. He saw Eiji take less and less, eat one fewer fish or hand him the sandwich out of the salty bag lunches he bought when they stayed at net cafes. Ankh let him do it without question, and why not? As long as Eiji performed his duties as OOO adequately, what harm could come of his foolish generosity?

Late evening meals after long days, those he didn't care for. The sudden heaviness in his stomach made him sleepy, another feeling he didn't keenly recognize. Ankh hated sleep, feared the surrender to nothingness for hours at a time, but could accept it if it followed relief from the ache of hunger. And he hated, at least initially, that Eiji recognized this reluctance in him. Eiji knew how to make him sleep.

He talked. He sat up and talked while Ankh slouched on the slope of the river bank or the wall of the cafe booth, and Ankh let him do it. He let him do it because he talked long and deeply about things Ankh had never seen or felt. He offered Ankh little glimpses his limited – but growing, always growing – knowledge of this new world with smells and tastes could translate into vicarious experience. The way the ocean moved and heaved under a boat under your feet, a thousand explosions of color popping on laughing bodies under glaring sun, the crackle of chewy-hard crust around cloud soft bread you had to eat straight away. All these things and more, he allowed Eiji to rattle on about until sleep took him.

Sometimes it took hours, at least until chance landed them in a small, dark place he could curl up somewhere elevated and accept that oblivion safely. Even then, Eiji ran his mouth late some nights, only now he recited memories like a mantra to occupy his mind. Now Ankh talked, too. To occupy himself, of course, never to pacify Eiji. He spoke sparingly, having few vivid and brilliant memories like Eiji did. Questions, always questions, always carefully phrased and formed to communicate as little curiosity as possible.

Now, alone, nodding from the familiar drip-away of his energy that would eventually end him, he wished he had asked more and more honestly. He wanted to shut his eyes and see a riot of color and not the silent forest or the glittering trail of his own body falling away. He wanted sweet bread that ruined if not eaten hot, he wanted endless snowy fields where you yell and wait and wait for your voice to echo back, he wanted white sand under sun so hot it scalded your feet. He wanted all these things he could never have.

He wanted Eiji to come and sit by him and recite them until he could close his eyes and sleep.

Yes. All these things he could never have.

 


End file.
